Back in January, there was a guest post on Flintknits about fabric designer Heather Ross and race and ethnicity in her fabric designs. I’ve been following the discussion with some interest, but was too busy during January to write anything about it, and by the time my schedule freed up a bit, I felt like I had kind of missed the boat on a timely response.

Pamela Wynne just posted a followup to that earlier post and I figured I would take the opportunity to bring these posts to your attention, because I find them really interesting. Even more than the posts, the comments! Go check them out. We’ve got the crazy racists, the indignant Heather, the “me toos” and oh, also the engaged and insightful dialogue about the issue.

You know, I feel kind of bad about posting this, for a couple of reasons: first of all, I respect Pam and enjoy reading her blog, and used to enjoy reading Ashley’s blog when it was still around, and I feel like this was all done with the best of intentions but that I’m about to say some bad stuff about their actions; and secondly, as a good Berkeley-raised-and-educated liberal person of color (and, incidentally, daughter of an ethnic studies professor), it’s clear to me how I think I’m supposed to feel about the issue. But I really don’t feel that way. At the risk of being the next hapless victim of the PC crafting police, here’s my take on it.

I frankly think the first post was a shameful and shallow dogpile. Heather Ross was arbitrarily picked out as a figure to crucify in the name of racial inclusiveness. Her designs clearly weren’t created with the intention of being hateful or exclusive, and come on, it’s not like she was drawing kids doing Confederate Civil War reenactments or something, they’re just some little girls playing with horses, and they just happen to all be white and blonde. Someone essentially swooped in out of nowhere, told her she should put more non-white kids in her designs, and then, when she declined, because she doesn’t need to do every single thing that consumers ask her to do, declared her to have “fucked up, in kind of epic ways,” posted her response, and tore her a new one.

Yes, maybe she was being a little stubborn in not wanting to take the various requests for diversity to heart. However, Heather Ross has a perfect right to draw anything she wants to. There’s no rule or law that says she has to be inclusive and racially diverse in her designs. If she had responded to the emails/comments with “oh sure, that’s a great idea, maybe I’ll put some black kids in my next design, it just never occurred to me and I think it would be fun” or something, bully for her. But that’s not what she wanted to do, so if she just stuck some ethnic children in her next fabric design purely to cave in to pressure, we’d just have some whimsical and adorable tokenism going on, some diversity-as-economic-commodity. (Maybe she could use the magic of Photoshop!) That’s not right.

What’s more, I think this is a crazy tempest in a teapot. Her fabric represents just a tiny corner of the fabric world, which represents just a tiny corner of the world of commercially available representational art. I’m sure there are plenty of racially inclusive quilting fabrics out there, if not via your local Jo-Ann fabrics, then through the Magic of teh Internets, and if not, with the rise of Spoonflower and other print-on-demand fabric outfits, it’s easier than ever to make whatever fabrics you want. (No longer am I beholden to the clumsy medium of potato stamps to depict my idyllic Asian-American childhood activities: Kumon math sets, Chinese summer camp, and making won ton! Rejoice, rejoice.) Complainers, you are artsy, crafty people. I know this because you are focused on buying fabric yardage. Go make some fabrics that look like what you want and maybe make a bunch of money doing it.

Plus, there are more important venues where these efforts can be focused. I know crafting is all near and dear to the heart, but these are quilting fabrics probably intended for mentally and emotionally robust grown-ups to purchase and use; perhaps it would be more constructive to focus on the dolls and items intended directly for impressionable children. Or at least to aim all this guilty rage towards a larger corporate target with a more diffuse market rather than one independent fabric designer. This is not to say it’s not an important topic, but I just think this whole Heather Ross-specific anger is kind of misguided and misdirected.

Kristen wrote a poignant response where she discusses her children’s excitement at finding dolls that looked like them. I grew up with these same feelings of underrepresentation (probably this has changed a bit with the rise of anime and manga?) I probably never thought about quilting fabrics or even pajamas or t-shirts or whatever, but one thing I remember always feeling sad about was the Pleasant Company’s American Girl dolls. Oh man, did I ever want one of these. They are such a crazy expensive scam (at the time, back in the late 80s/early 90s, it was, I think, $80 for a vinyl doll plus one outfit?), but they construct such appealing narratives around them, and all the paraphrenalia and stories made me insane with covetousness. But they never had any dolls that looked like me, and I always wished they did. I’ve written them letters over the years asking them to include an Asian doll, always with some polite response about my request being taken into account, but being subject to long market research and development timelines.

When I was a kid, the Pleasant Company’s approach to diversity was “we have a blonde white doll, a brunette white doll, and a brunette white doll with glasses”: they slowly started expanding their repertoire with a redheaded white doll, and then, slowly slowly (and I don’t remember the order in which these came, but I know they were all before the Asian-American doll), a black doll, a Mexican-American doll, a Native American doll, along with various other white dolls. Finally, although she’s just a sidekick, they introduced Ivy (from the 70s? It’s nearly time for my childhood’s decade to become “history”–good God!). Finally. I guess my point is that toys like this might be a better place to focus your requests and petitions. Heather Ross’s products are all essentially based around the brand of her individuality and personal style. Crap like the American Girl dolls is designed by committee and based on market demand, and I think has a greater impact on children’s psyches.

Don’t think I don’t notice all-white media or consumer product representations, I live in Wisconsin, for Christ’s sake, it happens all the time. For instance, check out the selection of neighborhood regulars at the Midtown Pub in nearby Middleton! Yeah, it’s pretty important, and it enters my mind all the time, and it kind of sucks that in those “what celebrity do you look like” games there are really not a whole lot of Asian females to choose from. But it’s just not the be-all and end-all, and I am not a helpless, spineless, media-absorbing jellyfish unable to stop my mind from absorbing all non-inclusive imagery and waving my sad tentacles going “noooo, it huuuuurts.” I looked at the cover of the menu and noticed this and found it a little funny and maybe a little sad, and then I opened the menu and ordered a hamburger and a beer and did not feel bad about myself or my place in the world. I could get upset, but I think the menu probably accurately reflects the reality around them–like Heather Ross’s point that her fabric was autobiographical and an accurate representation of a few faces she saw in her childhood–and I’d rather save the lion’s share of my emotional engagement for overt racism.

And I don’t deny that DIY culture and the online crafting blogosphere slant very heavily white. This commenter does a great job of articulating many of the things I see as problems with the racial issues in this subculture, so I’ll just point you over to him. (“The Feudal White Craftopia” is such a great description.) By being out here and saying my stuff and taking pictures of little yellow old me, I guess I’m probably doing my small part in helping diversify knitting blogs, but only racially: I mean, socioeconomically, I still come from a position of computer-literate, college-educated, middle-class privilege, like, I think, most of the craft bloggers out there. There’s diversity and there’s diversity.

P.S. Fun fact, did you know I started the pinny porn discussion that eventually led to the creation of BID on Ravelry? Ha ha!

P.P.S. Jesus, it’s 3:30 AM? Spring Forward, I hate you.

Edited to add: I did a bit more research and found a couple of other response posts I’d missed earlier:

Also, yes, I did know you started That Thread. You troublemaker you. T’other day Stefanie Japel posted about That Book (“so pretty, yet it makes me feel sort of bad about myself!”) and it brought it all back…

Is it wishy washy to say that I find a lot to agree with both in your estimation and in the ones by Ashley and Pam? Because I do. I find myself bouncing between a view that it’s unfair to focus on one specific person when she’s relatively small in the larger picture, and the view that some of her comments opened up the discussion of the larger picture. It was similar when the Jane Brockett controversy broke – there were insightful posts here, on Ravelry, and on Needled, and weird reactionary stuff on the BBC and in the papers, and it opened up an interesting and necessary dialog that began, perhaps unfairly, with one person and her representative views and ideas.

But I think an interesting idea that occurred to me in reading your post is that I, like, perhaps, many white people coming late to their own privilege, may have something of the “new convert” about me. Most of my personal experience with prejudice prior to an interracial marriage was to do with sex or religion, and while the latter can be closely linked with racism, it wasn’t in that context that I experienced it. What is known and obvious to people who grow up with racial inequality is a revelation to people like me, just as, I think, some of the prejudices against Catholics might be a revelation to a new convert. It’s one thing to understand something intellectually, and another to feel it turned on you or your loved ones. I am descended from Jews, but never really felt any Jewish identity until I heard an anti-Semitic speech and realized that the speaker was talking about me – that my lack of self identification with Judaism was no impediment to this man hating me and my family for the irrevocable fact that there are Jews in our family. I have since then felt, if not religiously Jewish, culturally Jewish, but I’m a latecomer.

Anyhoo, thank you – I’m glad to see another smart interpretation to this discussion, and I’m glad to see it continue.

I remember reading that guest post some time ago and thinking that the author was making a big issue out of nothing. I grew up in SF;s chinatown. If I were artistic enough to create fabric prints out of childhood memories, the prints would depict scenes of SF’s chinatown with Chinese kids hanging about the playground. I doubt that people would insist that I add kids of other ethnic origins to my designs, and if they did, I wouldn’t do it because those aren’t my memories. Why should Ms. Ross alter her memories to match what others think of as a more ideal world.

[…] Knits has posted a follow up to the original guest post, and Huan-Hua at Feather and Fan has posted her take on the matter. I hope it is taken as I intend it to be when I say that while both posts are in disagreement with […]

Oh, thank you. I was uncomfortable with the original post, and the firestorm after it. I understand the feelings on both sides, but I don’t think we have the right to dictate how to make someone else’s art PC in our eyes. And I don’t require someone else’s art reflect me to make me feel good about myself.

Thank you so much. I agree with everything you say. The hate against Heather Ross and the insistence that every single product available to us crafters should represent every possible diversity became ridiculous.

What an interesting discussion. I tend to agree with you. I honestly think that this whole debacle has been blown way, way out of proportion. Demanding that all art reflect political correctness is ridiculous, stifling, and terribly fake. We seem to have forgotten that at its core, this is art, and art should reflect something of the artist, in this case her personal memories and experience. I think that for Heather Ross to include ethnic children in her designs would be inauthentic and unfair to her as an artist. (My own personal childhood experience includes plenty of other Asian children but very few African-American children, and a lot of upper-middle-class families and no poor families and for me to include those people in any depiction of my childhood would feel like (pardon the word choice) “whitewashing” my experiences to make them the perfect Bennetton rainbow. ) In as far as the commercial side goes, I would say if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. There are plenty of other options instead.

amen, sister! i feel exactly the same way. the eye rolling commenced for me when Ross tried to explain that these were her childhood experiences. Is she supposed to insert *person of color* into her personal experience when it wasn’t there just to placate the naysayers? isn’t that even worse than omitting them in the first place?

i felt similarly when people started to dogpile on Sofia Coppola for making movies about privileged white people. hello–she’s the daughter of a famous director. she makes movies about what she knows. if she were to make a movie about, say, Haiti, i’d probably be more upset that she’s trying to make a condescending film about a subject she knows nothing about.

This post was awesome. The positions of privilege are far reaching and we so seldom talk about it, because someone out there is going to disagree and people can get awfully mean when typing out comments. Everything you had to say- hear, hear.

Coming from the world of white/middle class privilege — heck, I’m even blonde — I almost feel funny commenting, but I have to say that I have greatly enjoyed reading all of the discussion around this topic and it has really made me think. In the end, I tend to agree with you. It seems more productive to go after the larger corporations producing and marketing for the nation’s children rather than a small fabric designer whose target audience is a very, very small segment of the (adult) population. I hadn’t thought about the American Girls dolls in a long time….I had Kirsten and felt like she was tailor made for me (my ancestors were Swedish immigrants, too, though slightly later). At 8 years old, I never thought about how there wasn’t a doll that looked like the Middle Eastern, Indian, or Asian girls at my school, but now it makes me sad and I wish I’d had that awareness then. It’s something I’ll definitely think about as I buy toys for my yet-to-be-born son.

With Heather Ross, I worry that if she changed her designs to be more inclusive of race it would be disingenuous and, as you said, tokenism. And it would show. And where to draw the line? The little girls in her designs look just like me, but her fabrics don’t reflect my own childhood experiences….I’m sure people of different backgrounds feel even less connection to them. So should she start drawing different toys, stories, and scenes that *she* doesn’t relate to at all? As one independent fabric designer, how could she possibly include everyone who should be included?

Anyway, thank you for posting your take on this issue (and so eloquently!).

Thank you for this post! I read the original post and was just blown away by the ridiculousness of it. To attack a single designer for not being inclusive enough is just absurd. The industry, as a whole, may not be inclusive enough, but how is that possibly Heather Ross’s fault? She is an artist, creating what is compelling to her personally, and that is absolutely her right. I couldn’t believe how many people jumped on the original post and thought it was amazing. If you want to see more diverse fabrics, the people you should be pressuring is the industry not the individual designers!

“as a good Berkeley-raised-and-educated liberal person of color (and, incidentally, daughter of an ethnic studies professor), it’s clear to me how I think I’m supposed to feel about the issue.”

Experiences are funny things. My caused me to make the assumption that you would be a black woman. Its amazing to me how our environment and upbringing effects our thinking and “…think has a greater impact on children’s psyches.” You are so right.
Lucky we are able to learn and enhance our perceptions.

p.s.
had I seen a name, would would have been familiar with your patterns, as I have purchased them.🙂

I’m white
I’ve gotten no advantage being white
And don’t tell me I have because I HAVE NOT!
My entire childhood was us being told to not be judgmental and include all…
Obviously every other race was told how awful whites are and how non whites need to be represented equally not even at least percentage of population. Nope
I’m over all this white thrashing
It is ok to be white
It is ok to not have a friend from every race
It’s ok to be attracted to my own race
It is beautiful to be white but I can’t put that on a shirt like all other races or else I’m called racist.
I don’t even think of race but I’m constantly reminded by non whites about their race.
America is the best country in the world and no race of any color has a better shot at reaching their dream then right here.
The country is too PC and over regulated to the point of socialism now.
I can’t even look at fabric without race being brought in???
REALLY??!
Really???
Is there no end to this?